Strange Aeons

The Ig Noble Awards show comes to Dundee next month. Perhaps an opportunity to exercise your new critical thinking skills:

Ig Nobel Awards show - 6pm, Saturday 13th March 2010 Dalhousie building, University of Dundee, Old Hawkhill, DD1 4HD A free public event and everyone is welcome. The Ig Nobel Awards Show honours achievements that will make you laugh and then make you think. Marc Abrahams, organiser of the Ig Nobel Prizes and Guardian columnist, will review the past year's improbable research and a gaggle of Ig Nobel Prize winners will try to explain what they did and why they did it, and most importantly answer your questions. This event will entertain you with the latest discoveries and will make research fun and accessible to all! This is the first time that the Ig Nobel show has visited Dundee and is a hugely popular night out wherever it travels. Our speakers will explain;

• how your underwear could save you from certain death,
• why you should always keep a look out for flirtatious ostriches,
• how to avoid problems when using the word 'The',
• what is the best way to avoid sword-swallowing injuries from the author of the penetrating medical report “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”.

Book your free tickets at the University's Online Store.

According to this Time Higher Ed. article, Ulster University is ring-fencing new permanent posts within the university so that suitable existing staff coming to the end of fixed-term contracts can be given an opportunity to take them on. This is the only university that I am aware of that is taking concrete, public steps to providing a clear and stable career path for university employees, although I would be delighted to hear of others. I think that any university that is trying to reverse the trend towards fixed term contracts should be applauded for their public show of faith and commitment towards their employees.

As somebody who has been employed on fixed term contracts for several years and is finding it very tiresome, I am happy that something is starting to happen, I am just unhappy that it is not yet (?) my employer.

However it is interesting that this approach is portrayed in a negative light in the THE article. The so-called insider who brought this to the notice of the THE is quoted as saying that this policy will lead to the decline of the university as only "low-calibre fixed-term staff unable to find employment elsewhere" will be taken on permanently. This despite the fact that the university opens up the job posting to external applicants if nobody suitable can be found.

Interestingly the University itself would not comment on the matter which is a pity because I think that they should be trumpeting it from the rooftops. The increasing casualisation of University employment means that the majority of research employees are employed on fixed term contracts. For example, at Dundee the UCU figures for employment are as follows:

• 46.9% of teaching & research academics employed on fixed-term contracts
• 80.9% of teaching only academics employed on fixed-term contracts
• 97.1% of research only academics employed on fixed-term contracts

(Figures for 1995. Source: UCU)

This is despite an, as yet unfulfilled, public undertaken commitment upon the part of many universities to reverse the trend via the Research Concordat. Given that the higher education sector reportedly generates output worth more than £59 billion and supports over 668,500 jobs it could be seen as an important part of both the economy and social structure of Britain, in fact H.E. is actually more valuable to the UK than the pharmceutical industry . It strikes me that some measure of job security and a more clear career development path wouldn't be too much to ask for. Perhaps the performance of researchers would be enhanced if the 97.1% of researchers weren't increasingly stressed and preoccupied with the impending end of their current contract (and 2-3 years is not a long time in terms of a career).

I can only hope that more universities (hint Dundee) will show the same faith in their existing employees and will take their lead from Ulster University.

Note:

Whilst researching this piece I found out about a recent meeting at Dundee on the website of the College of Life Sciences PostDoc Association. I didn't here about this, although given that I was in and out of the country, it was during the summer recess, and I was coming to the end of my existing contract and that was foremost on my mind, maybe it just slipped past me.

Recently a new project started in ARG:dundee, the argumentation research group at Dundee University. This project, the Dialectical Argumentation Machines project, is quite exciting and involves building tools for working with arguments on the web.The project abstract is as follows:

Humans use argument to express disagreement, to reach consensus and to both formulate and convey reasoning. The theory of argument has found wide application in artificial intelligence, providing mathematical structures for automated reasoning, communication protocols for distributed processing and linguistic models for natural language processing. A key stumbling block, however, has been joining together models that focus on abstract, mathematical relationships with those that focus on concrete, linguistic relationships. The first objective of this project is to develop for the first time a theoretical account that connects static, "monologic" argument with dynamic, multi-person, "dialogic" argument and ties together abstract, mathematical models with concrete, linguistic representations. Furthermore, models of argument have been predominantly confined to the lab. Our goal is to translate the research advances into high profile, large scale deployments using partners with enormous user bases. Prototype systems in this area have been sufficient to demonstrate the unique advantages of practical argumentation systems to potential users of this research such as those within the broadcasting domain. There is a demonstrated public demand for argument-based exploration of current issues with complex scientific and ethical dimensions, demonstrated, for example, by the longevity and success of high profile programming featuring topical issues discussed in a stylised argumentative debate format. The second objective of this project is to develop the theory into implemented components that can form a foundation for application development to support actual programmes with prototype testing Unique advantages afforded by the technology will allow users to interact with the programme material as if they were themselves contributors, allowing arguments to be probed, tested and extended, and the distinction between in-programme and post-programme content to be blurred. The interaction metaphor shifts from 'message-then-next-message' to 'question-answer-riposte-challenge...'. The rich structure is natural for users, and provides rich metadata for programme-makers. Finally, in 2007 an exciting vision of the "world-wide argumentation web" (WWAW) was laid out, in which systems such as those constructed to work alongside practical prototypes could interact, both with each other and with other debate and argumentation systems, both populist and academic. Argument fragments, expressed as resources on the Semantic Web, can cross-refer, allowing different debating systems to navigate the WWAW according to various rules of dialogue captured by dialectical games. To bring this vision of the WWAW into reality, the third and final objective of the project is to allow execution of arbitrary dialogue games on a platform that provides interfaces for human players, and both interfaces and control for computer players of dialogue games. In this way, we want to harness the enormous channel to market and the high-profile reference case that is offered by collaboration within broadcasting. At the same time, the project will be developing platform technology that can support exploitation in other areas. During the project, we will work with the Scottish Mediation Network in the context of mediation tools, with the Ontario courts in the context of judicial summaries, and with the Universities of Lugano and Groningen in the context of legal education to identify exploitation routes for the technology.

Although I am not employed by this project it has brought the opportunity to increase the size of the group with the addition of three new members, Mark Snaith, who was one of my honours project students last year working on OVA and worked with ARG:dundee over the summer developing the newlook argdb and integrating it with OVA, John Lawrence, who originally developed MAgtALO whilst an MSc student working for Chris, and Floris Bex who recently completed his Ph.D thesis, entitled "Evidence for a Good Story" supervised by Henry. These new members all bring different perspectives to the group discussion but already it seems that there are now enough of us in the group that it is less hard work to keep the discussions going. Before we all had to work harder to share the load of running a group discussion between three of us. That is much easier with six.

This Dilbert cartoon seemed apropo given that I am still working on my CMNA9 presentation of the Argument Blogging Project work. I managed to record a short film of Colin talking about his project at the School of Computing 09 degree show held in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. I am not a videographer but I think that I managed to capture the essence of Colin's implementation work on the project (or rather Colin managed to make a good presentation and I managed to hold the camera reasonably steadily and zoom in/out and focus on the relevant bits almost at the right times).

We (meaning Andy) have run a successful Yahoo! HackDay at Dundee for the last couple of years. This year some of our students went down to the Yahoo! OpenHack event in Londidium to present their own hack: IntelliSearch, for which they won Best Mozilla Hack. Anyhow, two of the three students who developed IntelliSearch, Laurence & Chris, have been working in their spare time, on a multiplayer online game called Zandrok. Anyhow, yesterday I met with Chris to discuss his fourth year project which will use software agents in relation to Zandrok. More information will be forthcoming once we iron out what exactly we plan to achieve, but it should be an exciting project. In the meantime, here is the IntelliSeach presentation:

So there has been talk of standardising the ways that materials are made available to students. Dundee University has a web based system called MyDundee that is supposed to be the standard virtual learning environment for the university. I haven't gotten around to using this yet. I have logged in several times but I find the entire system to be quite impenetrable and contrary to the user interaction experience that we teach about in the School of Computing. There are a number of problems that I have with the system, apart from the useability, one is that I am essentially being dictated to as to which tools I should use to engage with my students, as opposed to allowing me the academic judgement to select the best tools for the job. I am not convinced that a one size fits all approach is an appropriate way to deliver academic materials across all of the subject domains taught at Dundee. More seriously, is the fact that the minimum requirements for the MyDundee system don't match the teaching environment for my second year module. The students are required to learn and use Linux during this module, but Linux is unsupported in the published technical specifications, so I run the risk of having teaching materials for a module locked away in a system that isn't guaranteed to be accessible from the systems that the module is teaching which is a little Kafkaesque. Additionally, having bitten the bullet and logged into the system, I find that right now I am not even able to access any of the modules that I actually teach! The current system I use is a wordpress blog for each taught subject. This requires only that students have access to a relatively modern web browser if they want to get access to all of the materials for the module. Additionally the materials aren't locked away behind an access wall so anybody who is interested can access them. This has two benefits, firstly lecturers at other universities around the world have occasionally found interesting and useful ideas in my lecture materials, which is quite gratifying to me, and secondly it means that I am backing up the argument that studying at Dundee is about more than just the material covered but is about the experience of actually coming here and interacting with, at least in the case of the School of Computing, a fairly excellent group of highly motivated individuals. If open access to learning materials is good enough for MIT, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Yale, Tufts, and Stanford, then surely it is good enough for us?

I shall probably regret saying this but I am over the busy hump of the semester. At least as far as time-tabled business is concerned anyhow. It is halfway through the second semester of the academic year and most of my active teaching related stuff, e.g. heavy regular lecture load, concentrated into the first half of the semester leading to a nice graceful curve down towards the end of the semester. In theory this means that I can begin to start ramping up my research activities again until the pattern repeats itself next academic year. The good thing is that I have a bit more time to spend posting here and at the other place because most of my blog posts have been on the websites for teaching modules that I am involved in. So, in summation, half semester gone, heaviest load of lectures gone, second semester exams written and ready to go the external examiner. A busy time! I have also managed to get a KTP proposal submitted so I am managing a few research related jobs. I just need to get my ARGMAS reviews finished tomorrow and it will have been a good week.

I just found this excellent resource called Photopolis that collects together around 5000 digitised photographs of old Dundee circa 1870-1905. I used to enjoy heading to the DCA when they showed old film of Dundee and I have a number of books that have been published that contain collections of photos of Dundee also. Unfortunately at the DCA screenings I was quite often one of the youngest in attendance, usually beaten only by the 8 year olds on a night out with their grandparents. The Dundee Photopolis collection is described thus:

The majority of photographs are the work of Alexander Wilson. Wilson was born in Duns, Berwickshire, and moved to Dundee in his twenties to become calender manager in the Baltic Street Calender of Baxter Brothers of Dundee. For over 30 years, he devoted his leisure time to photography. Many subjects were recorded over the years, but it is evident from the collection that his main interest was architecture. Alexander Wilson recorded the changing face of buildings in Dundee from the 1870s to 1905. It was fortunate that he was active at this time, since in the years that followed much redevelopment in Dundee resulted in elements of the City vanishing forever. Before his death in 1922 he bequeathed the majority of his 5,000 glass negatives to the Free Library Committee of the Town Council, with the sum of £50 to assist with conservation. The Collection is now stored in the Local Studies Department of the Central Library. The slides have been catalogued and are preserved in archival boxes. Prints have been made of the glass negatives and can be viewed by the public.